Following the successful pilot scheme in the city of Shenzhen last month, insiders say that the Suzhou district of Xiangcheng will launch a giveaway to coincide with the Double 12 shopping event in the country on Dec. 12.

Many businesses allegedly have already built near-field QR communication codes in preparation of the trial. A total of 10 million digital yuan is distributed to 50,000 red envelope winners in a lottery format in the previous Shenzhen trial.

Within two weeks of the envelopes being distributed, 95% of the winners spent their 200 digital yuan prize, with some participants going on to buy more. However, participants in the Shenzhen scheme were not able to use the “offline” and “touch” functions of the digital wallets, known as panda wallets.

The Suzhou rollout will include this functionality, allowing users to transfer money simply by touching mobile devices, even when neither are connected to a network.

Double 12 is a shopping festival run by e-commerce giant Alibaba, a month after the much-hyped “Singles Day” event. It focuses a lot of attention on offline spending and smaller brands.

A closed beta trial of the digital yuan is also underway in the city of Chengdu, and the 2022 Winter Olympics are also scheduled to participate in a closed pilot scheme.

[image: Cris Jiao]